Memorial to the Jews Imprisoned and Murdered at the Ereda Camp
Mälestusmärk Ereda laagris vangistatud ja mõrvatud juutidele
In 1967, a memorial to the approximately 2,000 victims of the Ereda labour camp, which was in operation in 1943/44, was erected in Ereda.
History
In the autumn of 1943, one of the first satellite camps of the Vaivara concentration camp was established in a forest near Ereda, in the north-east of Estonia. Until its dissolution in mid-July 1944, the camp at times held over 1,900 prisoners, mostly Jewish forced labourers who were deployed in a bituminous shale mine. The men and women came from Lithuania and from the German Reich. The camp was first under the command of the paramilitary engineering group Organisation Todt, at the end of 1943 it was taken over by the SS. When German troops were retreating from the east, Ereda became one of the collection camps for »evacuated« prisoners. In early summer 1944, the SS transferred Jewish women from Hungary to Ereda from camps that had previously been dismantled. In the course of Ereda's dissolution, the SS carried out a mass shooting on the camp premises.
Victims
About 2,000 prisoners of the Ereda camp perished or were murdered, most of them Jews. Exact numbers cannot be determined.
Following intense political pressure and threats of violence, in June 1940 the Red Army occupied Estonia - which had enjoyed independence since 1918 - along with Latvia and Lithuania. The occupation was a result of the so-called Hitler-Stalin (or Molotov-Ribbentrop) Pact, a secret agreement concluded between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union in 1939 which established the »spheres of interest« of both countries in Eastern Europe. Subsequent to the annexation of Estonia and its incorporation into the union of Soviet republics, in 1940-41 the Soviet secret service (NKVD) deported around 11,000 Estonians to Siberia, including 500 Jews. When the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in summer 1941 they also conquered Estonia, where the majority of the population welcomed them as liberators. Around 3,000 Estonian Jews had managed to escape to the Soviet heartland. By the end of 1941, members of SS Einsatzgruppe A (mobile killing unit) and Estonian auxiliaries had shot the approximately one thousand Jews remaining. The SS subsequently declared the country to be »free of Jews«. In autumn 1942, Estonian police shot around 1,800 Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto, Frankfurt and Berlin in the sand dunes of the Kalevi-Liiva beach on the Baltic Sea.
Estonia lost a third of its population of a little over one million during the Second World War. After the Red Army had regained the country in autumn 1944, Estonia again became part of the Soviet Union. There followed a renewed wave of deportations and state terror. Moreover, after 1945 there was a policy of moving non-Estonians – in particular Russians – into the country. These individuals were to make up around a third of the population of 1.3 million by the end of the 1980s. Today there is still conflict between Estonian and Russian memories in the country, which is one of the strongest supporters of EU and NATO integration. The Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic commemorated the 9 May as the »Day of Liberation from Hitlerite Fascism and of Victory in the Great Patriotic War« and built a large number of monuments to honour the »glorious« Red Army. Yet for many Estonians these monuments are above all a reminder of the decades of Soviet occupation. Former concentration camps such as Klooga or Vaivara served as memorials to the victims of the German occupation and at the same time were used to justify the Soviet regime.
After Estonia regained independence in 1991, there were numerous disputes between Estonians and Russians regarding remembrance. In February 2007, the Parliament voted by 46 to 44 to remove all monuments honouring the Red Army. The removal of a Soviet memorial (»bronze soldier«) from the centre of the capital Tallinn to a military cemetery in May 2007 provoked violent protests from the Russian minority, who received support from Moscow. Following the full-scale Russian attack on Ukraine, the bronze soldier was damaged. There are repeated and long-lasting disputes concerning veterans’ meetings and ceremonies honouring Estonians who fought on the side of the Germans as SS volunteers during the Second World War. In view of these circumstances, an American organisation has assumed the task of laying memorial stones for Jewish victims.
Remembrance
In 1967, the local Soviet authorities commissioned Estonian architect Peeter Somelar with designing a monument to the »victims of facism« in Ereda. The inscription reads in Russian and in Estonian: »No one has been forgotten. Nothing is forgotten! Over 2,000 victims of fascism were executed, burned and buried here in the years 1943-1944. We cannot enumerate their noble names here: too many are under the eternal watch of the granite. Yet not a single one of them will fall into oblivion, nothing will«.
Around 2005, a further monument was erected. Its shape and inscription are the same as a memorial which was dedicated by the Estonian president near Klooga, also in 2005. In contrast to the monument from the Soviet era, the new one clearly identifies the victims as Jews. Each year, commemorative ceremonies in honour of the victims are held on January 27, on May 8/9 and on September 19. In addition, the Jewish community of the Ida-Viru district organises lectures and seminars on the Holocaust, with an emphasis on the history of the region.
